Senate rejects EPA restraints

WASHINGTON - In a boost for the president on global warming, the Senate on Thursday rejected a challenge to Obama administration rules aimed at cutting greenhouse-gas emissions from power plants and other big polluters.

The defeated resolution would have denied the Environmental Protection Agency the authority to move ahead with the rules, crafted under the federal Clean Air Act. With President Obama's broader clean-energy legislation struggling to gain a foothold in the Senate, the vote took on greater significance as a signal of where lawmakers stand on dealing with climate change.

"If ever there was a vote to find out whose side you are on, this is it," said Sen. Barbara Boxer (D., Calif.), chairwoman of the Environment and Public Works Committee.

The vote was 53-47 to stop the Senate from moving forward on the Republican-led effort to restrain the EPA. All Philadelphia-area senators voted against the GOP resolution (S.J. Res. 26).

Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I., Conn.) predicted the vote would "increase momentum to adopt comprehensive energy and climate legislation this year."

Obama still needs 60 votes to advance his energy agenda, and Democrats don't have them yet. Sen. James M. Inhofe (R., Okla.) said the vote made clear that a majority in the Senate backed either a delay or an outright ban on "the Obama EPA's job-killing, global-warming agenda."

Republicans, and the six Democrats who voted with them to advance the resolution, said that Congress, not bureaucrats, should be in charge of writing climate-change policy.

But Democrats, referring frequently to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, said it made no sense to undermine efforts to curtail greenhouse-gas emissions and reduce dependence on oil and other fossil fuels.

The effort to block the rules "is an attempt to bury our heads in the sand and ignore reality," said Sen. Tom Udall (D., N.M.).

Obama said the vote was another reminder of the need to pass legislation to reduce the country's reliance on oil. The White House had issued a veto threat this week, saying the resolution would block efforts to cut pollution that could harm people's health and well-being.

"Today the Senate chose to move America forward, toward that clean-energy economy - not backward to the same failed policies that have left our nation increasingly dependent on foreign oil," he said.

The EPA crafted standards on greenhouse-gas emissions by big polluters after the Supreme Court ruled that those emissions could be considered a danger to human health and thus could be regulated under the Clean Air Act. The rules are to go into effect in January.

The poor chances of the anti-EPA measure overcoming a veto and becoming law did not deter fierce debate.

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky called the new regulations a "blatant power grab by the administration and the EPA." With a broad energy bill unlikely to pass this year, "the administration has shifted course and is now trying to get done through the back door what they haven't been able to get done through the front door," he said.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said Thursday that he anticipated the Senate taking up a broader energy bill in the next several weeks, "and hopefully we can get something done before Congress adjourns this year."